Late last night, the Washington Postreported that Wikileaks founder and failed Bond villain Julian Assange will be indicted for his role in the events leading up to the 2016 presidential election. This information was revealed after prosecutors from the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) inadvertently left Assange’s name in another, non-related unsealed court filing which was then discovered by an attentive online journalist. This culminates a week of non-online activity by Wikileaks as well as a week of high-profile chatter among the online intelligence community that something big was coming down the pipeline.

What’s most ironic is that these charges stem from EDVA and not Mueller. Mueller has had Assange in his sights for a while and, of course, his star-studded team has kept any and all information about Assange closely guarded to their chest. Mueller may very well bring separate charges against Assange for his role in hacking and distributing stolen materials in the run up to the 2016 presidential election. At this point, Mueller is light years ahead of where we and the media are and odds are that he already has a multitude of charges lined up against Assange with his own series of sealed indictments raring to go.

In the grand scheme of things, Assange may be a small fish. However, he in intricately tied to the events that happened leading up to the 2016 election. Wikileaks was engaged in weaponized cyber warfare with a hostile foreign adversary against the United States. They may have dropped emails rather than bombs but the intent was the same: to destabilize the United States in a way that undermined our country’s sovereignty to engage in a free and democratic election. After being instructed by Donald Trump, Russian hackers began searching for Hillary Clinton’s stolen emails the exact same day in July of 2016. It was a mere hours after the Access Hollywood tape dropped in October that Wikileaks dropped a batch of emails stolen from John Podesta. The October batch was dropped with the full knowledge of Trump campaign staffers Roger Stone and Randy Credico as reports have revealed this week. And, of course, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that “Organization 1” in the Special Counsel’s July indictment against Russian hackers is clearly Wikileaks and its involvement in receiving stolen material from hacker Guccifer 2.0.

Of course there will be those Glenn Greenwald libertarians who see this as an attack on press freedom. Already we’ve had a hot take from Adam Goldman of The New York Times saying that this indictment sets a horrible precedent for those journalists willing to uncover government secrets. However, what these so-called patriots fail to realize is that Assange and Wikileaks aided and abetted a terrorist attack. They may not have sold terrorists bombs and bullets, but what they did sell them was stolen information. These faux-libertarians would see no problem is charging an individual or organization with supplying stolen weapons to ISIS but somehow see it as a problem to hold Wikileaks accountable for their supplying stolen information to Russian intelligence who then used the information to conduct cyber warfare. What the Adam Goldmans and Glenn Greenwalds of the world refuse to recognize is that there is a difference between having a free and open press versus illegally stealing and distributing information with the implicit knowledge that it will be used in an online terrorist attack.

Overall, Assange’s role in all this is fairly insignificant as he is relegated to simply being an intermediary between Guccifer 2.0 and the GRU. However, his indictment has the chance to break open the dam in the larger Russian investigation. If it can be proven that Stone, Credico, and the other inhabitants on the island of misfit Trump allies were in open communication with those doing the hacking and that they were aiding and abetting the hacking and subsequent distribution of that stolen information then it’s game over on the conspiracy front. Remember, Trump and his cohort are not the brightest of bulbs. Stone has previously admitted that he had been in contact with Guccifer 2.0 back in August of 2016 and there exists an extensive timeline of their interactions. In September of 2016, Stone asked Credico to personally ask Assange for stolen Hillary Clinton emails after having interviewed him. In short, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb were not covert in their treason and they left a paper trail longer than the Great Wall.

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